Photoblogging Friday – 16

An ugly week of earning reports from newspaper companies has ended and the only lesson to be learned is that which could have been learned from Trading Places: invest in pork bellies and frozen concentrated orange juice.

Yesterday I stumbled upon the American Memory site that houses photographs from the Chicago History Museum. The Photographs from the Chicago Daily News 1902-1933 is what got be thinking that it would be nice to include a photograph here for our traditional Photoblogging Friday feature.

The Chicago Daily News was an afternoon paper that published for a bit over 100 years and closed about two years before I finished getting my J degree — essentially ending any chance I had of getting a good job at a daily newspaper in the Midwest (so off to LA for me).

The two photographs I’ve selected are of favorite subjects of mine: Clarence Darrow, seen during the original trial-of-the-century, the Leopold and Loeb case, and Ty Cobb, baseball’s greatest hit-for-average star. Growing up in Detroit, Cobb was as a local hero — until I learned his story and discovered the man was from Georgia and a true SOB.

← Ty Cobb, SDN-051967,Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum.But one thing you could say about Cobb was that he knew what to do with his money. Cobb started investing in Coca-Cola way back in 1907, the exact same year this photography of him was taken, eventually securing 20,000 shares and a couple of bottling operations. There is no record of Cobb investing in a newspaper company.